Pursuing the Goddess

Aset or Isis, Egyptian Queen of Heaven

Since 2002 I have been researching into something that I felt more than anything else. Something was nagging me. At the time I lived, as I do now, in France, and the signs of Goddess-worship were all around me. Cathedrals were full of images of the Goddess, the art replete with them. I could see this but I couldn’t define it, I couldn’t understand what it meant.

When I returned to Scotland I was a very busy man for a long time, building a house and trying to make ends meet from my freelance work, and also my own mother became ill and died, so the research went on hold. But it was always there in the back of my mind, and as I travelled round Scotland, that epicentre of dry Presbyterianism, I saw again and again the unmistakable mark of the Goddess all over the architecture and in the symbolism.

The Goddess was the principal focus of my Masters’ Degree research and even though I came a long way, I didn’t reach the answer I sought. When I came back to France I began to write, but in April of 2012 I had to stop. I was getting too confused.

My research had spanned the entire world and the whole of recorded history by that time, and I still hadn’t made the breakthrough. I put my notes and files aside.

Most of the rest of 2012 was a bucket year; I sailed my boat round Scotland and then went to Asia to blow the proceeds of her sale; along the way, I fell in love. Recharged, in 2013 I began to research again, but this time, for reasons I couldn’t be sure of, except that I am a firm believer in just following my nose, I found myself studying the Bible, which I had not done for decades. I was once again pursuing the ever-mysterious and elusive Goddess, whom I thought must reside in Eve and Mary, and of course she does. But there was something more, something I was just not seeing.

In the end, brain fever set in and I decided to put these notes too, to one side, and concentrated on less intellectually demanding projects, which resulted in Silas Farsight and French Onion Soup! being finally completed. But the Goddess was always there and I knew she would call me back sooner or later; I knew there was something she still had to tell me, something that perhaps she had been trying to tell me all along, but my mind had not been open enough to accept.

I had a teacher once, who really was not a very good teacher at all, but he did impart one piece of wisdom to me in the years I knew him; he extolled the merits of the ‘fresh eye’. ‘When you’re stuck,’ he said, ‘Put it away. Cover it up, hide it. When you come back you’ll have a fresh eye, and that will make things clear.’

Well, he was right, and for this one veracity, I forgive him all his waspishness and jealousy.

Two weeks ago, after the New Year, I went back to my drawers of pages, notebooks full of scribbles and my digital folders swollen with documents. I began reading over what I had already written about the Goddess, and…there it was. On Friday, I found it. The speck of dust that crystallised the super-saturated solution. The key that unlocked the door. The secret code that, when applied, made sense of everything, where there had been no sense before. Just like that. Click.

On Friday morning I was looking at a pile, nearly 300,000 words, of notes and hypotheses that just…were completely confusing. Today I am looking at a satisfyingly complete view that explains the whole of Western culture, from the earliest records we have, till now, and is fully supported by the evidence.

Okay, so, fair enough, I still have to turn this into something readable, but now the lights are on. I’m not feeling my way forward in the dark any more, listening to the Goddess’ voice whispering half-heard, inexplicable mysteries, like an archaeologist exploring a huge catacomb, his candle guttering and flickering fantastic shapes on the walls. I found the switch and bingo, hahaha! It’s ferking obvious now, plain as the nose on your face. All the colour and glory clear to see, all the complexity of interwoven cultural collections. It’s as if I had lit a 1000-watt halogen lamp inside the tomb of a lost pharaoh for the first time in millennia, and was overwhelmed by the revelation.

Like they say, it’s easy when you know. Years of research in so many related fields, enough books to sink a ship, most of the important cathedrals in France visited (and not a few elsewhere) and one, little, tiny detail that I had assumed unimportant turned out to be the key. It wasn’t unimportant at all; it was THE important.

Without it, nothing made sense, and with it, everything does. Which I think says something about being completely open when doing research, having no preconceptions and just following the evidence.

I think I feel quite good about this. And if you want to find out exactly what the secret I discovered is, you’ll have to wait till the book is finished. It will be worth it.